Halloweegan Bat Pancakes and Vida Vegan!

Thank you for helping keep the Halloweegan fire burning! On top of each sweet comment, Becks offered me a whoopie pie to “stoke the creative furnace”, Megan offered me lots of suggestions (and now I’m just going to have to make a Coffin Coffee Cake!), and Cindy suggested I throw in some crafts like I had intended to do. I’m all re-inspired now and ready to tackle the second half of Halloweegan! Thank you for all your support! :)

Like I promised, today we have a Halloweegan blooper courtesy of Ms. Buffoonery. I made some batty pancakes that were supposed to look like this:

Look at those perfectly round heads! That’s how they were supposed to be, but the first time I made them they looked more like a bunch of flat tires:

*Wha wha whaaa**EPIC FAIL*

*Sigh* The chocolate cream that I made was way too soft and it completely melted on top of the warm pancakes! Dummy. The second batch of heads went better, and I decided to go with a regular chocolate buttercream instead. Buttercream for breakfast? Well, yes! It’s Halloween!

I made silver dollar Pumpkin Pancakes and replaced three tablespoons of flour with three tablespoons of unsweetened cocoa powder + two tablespoons of sugar. The buttercream was Chocolate Buttercream Frosting from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World. Only the bottom of the buttercream got a little melty this time which left me with round heads!

To plate the pancakes, cut them in half (straight or zig-zag) and place them on a plate like this:

Wings!

If you want to decorate the plate with a strawberry or raspberry or cranberry sauce for a bloddy effect, that makes them look extra creepy! I was really winging it with the sauce, but it was similar to this allrecipes sauce. Use a cookie scoop or ice cream scoop to, well, scoop little frosting heads right in the middle of each set of wings.

The eyes? They’re dried cranberries. Yuck. They’re only there for decoration and I ate around them to avoid chewing on a piece of evil. You can use whatever you want though, raspberries, nuts, chocolate chips…

Unrelated Halloweegan cuteness! Check out who was hanging out in our back yard yesterday!

So cool! I don’t think I had ever seen a huge praying mantis up-close and personal like that before. This guy was checking out our every move. If we moved to the left, his head moved to the left in a very security-camera, robotic way. If we moved to the right, well, you get the point.

Do you see that look of disapproval on his face? (I know he was a male, he said his name was Dwight) That’s because I had just told him that I wasn’t going to attend the Vida Vegan Blogger Conference because I am an anti-social hermit who also happens to be broke. Are you going? You should, you don’t want to disappoint Dwight. He’ll never let you hear the end of it! Plus, it looks like it’s going to be awesome and all the cool kids are going to be there! :)

Love the pancakes! I bet you could concoct a bat head from almond butter and chocolate — I mean in case you didn’t want to eat buttercream for breakfast, but I guess most people would probably just want the buttercream. I once got attacked by a mantis who’d been giving me the eye (and the creeps). It flew at my head and wouldn’t give up. They’re cool to look at but not THAT close. Sheesh.

have i ever told you that bats are my absolute favoritest animal? :) i love them all – and i love your halloweegan bat pancakes! so clever, River! :) buttercream for breakfast = the best! when i was growing up we’d always have dessert first on halloween night. the tradition started with my grandmother who one year made a turkey for halloween per the requests of her six children (one of them being my father). anyways….pre-halloween-fun-times dinner rolls around and guess what?! the turkey wasn’t done yet – so my grandmother served them dessert first and they had dinner after trick or treating! ah ha ha! i’m all about sweet at some non-traditional times, so bring in the breakfast buttercream! i must say, that while i find dried cranberries to be not too bad, i say yuck to goji berries. i know they’re good for me and i try to eat them every once in a while, but i don’t care for them at all!

Those bats are too cute! You must have been force-fed cranberries in a former life. ;) I actually liked the first ones–they look kinda like cute l’il bunny heads!

I also can’t afford to go to the conference even though I am only partly an anti-social hermit (sniff! Why is everything in Seattle or Portland??) ;) Hoping Dwight will forgive me–to me, he looks scarier than the bats!